Dryden Vos is a villainous character in the Star Wars film franchise, appearing in Solo: A Star Wars Story. He was a near-human criminal who served as the public face of the Crimson Dawn syndicate. He was portrayed by Paul Bettany.
History
During the reign of the Galactic Empire, Dryden Vos acted as the head of Crimson Dawn, one of the most ruthless crime syndicates in the galaxy. However, he was actually only the public face of the organization, a puppet ruler who answered to the syndicate's true leader, the former Sith lord Maul. Vos enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, travelling the galaxy on his star-yacht First Light, collecting rare and valuable antiquities from many different worlds.
Around 13 BBY, Vos had bought the Corellian Qi'ra from a slave trader who, had in turn, bought her from Lady Proxima, leader of the White Worms gang on Corellia. Having rescued Qi'ra from a life of slavery and suffering, Vos demanded her unconditional obedience in return, branding her with Crimson Dawn's symbol and keeping her close by at all times as his personal assistant on the First Light. He treated her with dignity, even affection and taught her martial arts so she could defend herself.
Ten years before the Battle of Yavin, the scoundrel Tobias Beckett became indebted to Vos, promising him a large amount of coaxium as payment. Beckett and his crew attempted to steal a container full of coaxium that belonged to the Empire from a conveyex transport. Unfortunately for Beckett, the heist ultimately failed due to the intervention of Enfys Nest and her swoop pirate gang, the Cloud-Riders, costing him the cargo and two of his teammates, his lover Val and the Ardennian pilot Rio Durant. However, his recruit, the young Han Solo, insisted that he meet Vos to talk with him about what had happened. Upon arriving at Vos' yacht, as Han reunited with Qi'ra, Vos received Beckett and expressed his condolences for the loss of Val, revealing that he knew what happened with the conveyex heist. In his office, Vos told Beckett that he needed to face his wrath for having failed him once more, but Solo attempted to convince Vos to give Beckett another opportunity by sending them to the spice mines of Kessel to steal the coaxium stored there. At first, Vos rejected the plan because he didn't want to anger the Pykes, but Qi'ra ultimately convinced him that it was a good idea.
In order to attack the spice mines of Kessel, Beckett's crew enlisted the help of the smuggler and sabacc player Lando Calrissian and his droid L3-37, who brought them to Kessel aboard the Millennium Falcon. There, Beckett's crew infiltrated Kessel's spice mines, took down Quay Tolsite and his guards and managed to steal the coaxium, at the cost of L3-37's destruction. After escaping from the Empire's clutches once more in the Maw Cluster, making the Kessel Run in just 12 parsecs, the crew arrived at Savareen to refine the coaxium. After Lando departed with the Falcon and the crew encountered Nest, learning of her intentions to help the rebellion with the coaxium, Solo decided to deceive Vos and give the coaxium to the Cloud-Riders. He and Qi'ra took the coaxium to Vos, telling him that Beckett did not survive the mission.
To their surprise, Vos revealed that he knew the coaxium aboard his yacht was fake, and that he was warned by his "inside man" about Han's betrayal. Though Han initially believed that Qi'ra betrayed them, Vos revealed that his "inside man" in fact Beckett, who decided to betray his crew so that Vos spared his life. However, as they anticipated Beckett's betrayal, Solo had presented the true shipment of coaxium to Vos, and had only told Beckett it was fake. Nevertheless, Beckett resolved to take Chewie hostage and escape with the real coaxium, leaving Vos to face Qi'ra and Han, leading to a fight in which Vos accidentally destroyed several artifacts in his study.
Death
In the midst of Han and Vos' attempts to kill each other, Qi'ra came to Han's defense by attacking Vos with a sword retrieved from the corpse of one of the Hylobon Enforcers. In the fierce scuffle between the two, Vos cut the blade of his opponent's sword in half, which resulted in his own weapon getting stuck in it. Unarmed and defenseless, Vos was finally impaled by Qi'ra and dropped to the floor, dead. After promising Han that she would take valuables from the yacht and meet him outside, Qi'ra instead sealed the room after Han's departure and used Vos' ring to falsely tell Maul that Tobias Beckett had been responsible for Vos' death, and was ordered to take the yacht to Dathomir.